The View from the Kuiper Belt

Above I have tried to do graphic justice to Matt Taibbi’s famous description of Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money."

Of course, one basic flaw in Taibbi’s ongoing, panoramic, detailed and prodigious analysis of the horrors Goldman Sachs has visited on humanity is that Taibbi himself is human, and therefore would necessarily be biased against a great big, world-crushing succubus whose mindless, rapacious pursuit of profit threatens to smash civilization into a never-ending Dark Age of corporate feudal masters reigning forever over universal peonage.

Rest assured, David Fucking Brooks

harbors no such biases.

As an eager and tireless handmaiden to power, the Uriah Heep of the Conservative Movement, for one, welcomes our new, plutocratic overlords and would like to remind them that as a trusted Villager pundit, he can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in their underground Credit Default Swap caves.

And so, in lieu of an explanation suitable for human beings living in the real world, Conservative David Brooks provides yet another of his signature Texas-4th-grade-history-book-Sparknotes overviews of These United States

...as seen by an alien...

...squinting into the glare of a receding Sun...

...as it zooms past on its way back to Ophiuchus.

Brooks mentions dryly that the financial problems that are currently wracking the Earth were caused by a group called “everybody” and were not noticed until it was too late -- over and over and over again -- by another group called “the establishment.”

Brooks notes that:

“People who make it into the establishment work and play well with others. They are part of the same overlapping social networks, and inevitably begin to perceive the world in similar, conventional ways. They thrive in institutions where people are not rewarded for being cantankerous…”

Also too, if this were a Hollywood movie, the contrarians who saw it coming wouldn’t be a tiny minority of hairy-eared, urine-smelling knee-biters who live in mud huts and eat bugs, because…

“In this drama, in other words, the establishment was pleasant, respectable and stupid, while the contrarians were smart but hard to love, and sometimes sleazy.”

For some reason, the David Brooks makes no mention of ideological provenance of the orgy of radical deregulation that caused our long-stable financial system to suddenly become as prone to being ripped to pieces by packs of jackals as a hobbled goat staked out at a watering hole.

Or as prone to heart attacks as Dick Cheney.

David Brooks also makes no mention of political provenance of those who are getting their pockets stuffed in exchange for making sure the damage is never repaired, and that the same depraved slugs who brought us to tears to begin with are kept supplies with fresh victims until the end of time.

But I guess when you’re the royal scribe carefully parsing together the history texts for your new overlord’s crowned princelings, you have to keep it simple and comforting.

So instead of reading something awkward about Goldman Sachs and

Vampire Squids, future generations of Wall Street royalty will get,

Goldman Sachs:

Mostly Harmless.